Townsend, Joanna Kate (1999) Speaking the body, representing the self : hysterical rhetoric on stage. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis centres on the twin discourses of hysteria and theatre, and contends that an
examination of hysteria, which is above all a performative disease, can illuminate our
understanding of performance on the public stage. My analysis of the history of
hysteria shows that our modern understanding of the condition developed out of the
interactions between the physician/analyst and the live body of the hysteric, with all its
symptomatic acts, this thesis, which has as its central concern the live body of staged
performance, uses the history of those interactions to re-centre attention on the
symptomatic acts of the performing body on stage, and on the process of reading such
acts.
Drawing its material from a number of stage performances from the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries - from the texts of melodrama such as The Dumb Man of
Manchester(l837) or The Bells (1871) through the work of the American actress
Elizabeth Robins in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (1891) and her own play Alan's Wife
(1893) to modem texts such as Helne Cixous's Portrait of Dora (1976) - this thesis
reads those performances, and the relationship of those performances to their
audiences, through the lens of hysteria: using an understanding of hysteria to read
those texts anew and, in reverse, using the texts to develop, and critique, a model of
hysterical performance rhetoric.
Such a model, this thesis argues, with its very basis in a condition of rejection
of or failure to fit into the dominant discourses of society, is not limited in application
to performance texts which take hysteria as their subject. Instead it can be more
widely employed as a key part of a radical theatrical politics by those who today find
themselves silenced by the dominant discourses and values of our own era.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN2000 Dramatic representation. The Theater
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Hysteria, Theater, Acting
Official Date:	May 1999
Dates:	Date Event May 1999 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Chedgzoy, Kate ; Howard, Tony, 1947-
Sponsors:	University of Warwick ; University of Warwick. Dept. of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Extent:	vii, 313 leaves
Language:	eng

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